Laura Wilkinson

This month I’m tackling another set of words that sound similar but have different common meanings and usages: ensure, assure, and insure. Do you already know the difference? Let’s start with the most straightforward: insure. Just like the word “insurance,” insure means to provide or obtain insurance for. You can think about it as taking read more…

This month, I’m back on the topic of punctuation marks. Whose turn is it this time? Apostrophes. These little marks are used in a few ways, but the main two are (1) to indicate missing letters in contractions (such as “don’t” or “they’ll”—not the pregnancy kind of contractions) and (2) to indicate possession (that something read more…

I have a special Laura’s Lessons post this month—one that doesn’t tackle a grammar issue but rather a writing one: plagiarism. Perhaps coronavirus has you spending most of your working time at home and you’ve decided to tackle some writing. Or maybe writing is part of your everyday life. Regardless, in medical education we all read more…

Commas, commas, commas. There are so many rules, so many opinions, and so many ways to use this tiny punctuation mark. I previously waded into comma usage with commas and conjunctions, and now I’ll swim further into the comma pool with comma splices. A “splice” is a joint or joining of two things. To me, read more…

This month’s grammar topic is dangling modifiers. Sounds like what grammarians do when they’re looking for an adrenaline rush, but this type of dangling isn’t all that daring. A dangling modifier is a part of a sentence that doesn’t clearly refer to its intended subject. This typically happens when the introduction of a sentence isn’t read more…

We all want our writing to be easy for our readers to understand, right? I doubt many of us want readers to go through a sentence 2, 3, 4 times and still not get it. Since there are many factors that go into straightforward writing, I’ll start with a fun topic: unclear antecedents. Eh…what? An read more…

This month I’m tackling parallelism, or parallel construction. When things are parallel, they go in the same direction equally distant from each other. This applies to grammar because we want our words to be formatted similarly (such as in the same tense) for readers to easily digest the information. We want to keep sentences parallel. read more…

Choosing when to use a comma can be so frustrating! Some people use too many, some people don’t use enough, and pretty much everyone can agree that there are too many “rules” for writers to keep straight. Plus, those rules can differ based on each writer’s (and editor’s) style and preference…hence the confusion. Let’s gently read more…

Here’s a common question scientific writers ask themselves: “Is it i.e. or e.g.?” I’ve thought that same thing countless times. These two Latin abbreviations pop up all over the place, and they stand for exempli gratia (e.g.) and id est (i.e.). For those of you who aren’t fluent in dead languages (I’m right there with read more…

A topic that often stumps people is how to choose the correct word between two (or more) similar choices. One of these common swaps is “affect” and “effect.” You’re not alone—I used to frequently interchange these terms until I came across a great mnemonic: RAVEN. It’s all over the internet, but Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty read more…

Last month I explained the joys of a semicolon, so what better next topic than the colon (grammatical, not anatomical)? A colon introduces something (or things) that describe whatever comes before the colon. In most style guides, colons come at the end of a complete sentence; we commonly see colons after phrases like “as follows,” read more…

Ah, the semicolon. Part comma, part colon, 100% confusing. Do you remember how to use them, and do you even need to? In many cases, semicolons are a personal preference—a way to link sentences together without using a conjunction like “and,” “or,” or “but.” They can also help clarify long lists of items that might read more…